Stephen, you ignorant slut!

In a week that’s designed to showing the folly of taking the opinions of your favourite writers (*cough* LoisMcMasterBujold *cough*) or entertainers too seriously, Stephen Fry has decided to up the ante by blowing off the public anger about the way members of parliament have been fiddling their expenses. His comments on what he characterised as “this rather tedious bourgious obsession with whether or not [MPs] charge for their wisteria” could’ve only been made by somebody whose bank account is comfortably in the six or seven figures. He scolds that we should concentrate on the things that “really matter” rather than this “journalistic made-up frenzy”, but then he is unlikely to ever again get into a position where he’ll have to explain a discrepancy of five pounds to a bored department of work and pensions civil servant who is going to decide whether or this means he’ll lose his benefits or just has to pay a fine he can’t afford.

The point is that after twelve years of Labour government, inequality is at its highest since the sixties while the MPs and Labour ministers supposed to look out for the poor and the common people have been stuffing their face. Millions of people have to survive on wages or benefits of less than 20,000 per year without any expense account and when they “forget” to declare income or get slightly more benefits than they’ve got a right to, whether through their own fault or not, they get prosecuted to the full extent of the law for it. And all this time, with succesive work and pensions ministers talking tough about taking on benefit cheats, MPs of all parties felt entitled to not just their sixty grand salary and very favourable expense account but to every dirty trick that could squeeze a few more pounds out of the taxpayer. It’s not just getting your 1500 quid new telly reimbursted, it’s getting sweetheart deals for your second home, building miniature property empires, getting rich out of being in parliament. The worst example being one T. Blair, now worth several millions on the back of the contacts made during his premiership.

What’s we’ve seen these last twelve years in parliament is a frenzy of corruption and greed mirroring the corruption and greed in high finance; it’s no accident that Brown’s economic policy has always revolved around the financial sector. Even before they got into power it was obvious New Labour had been seduced –had willingly thrown itself in the arms of — this sort of Cool Brittania view of a classless society where everybody is rich, young and has a job doing something interesting in new media or finance or property. A New Labour MP is somebody who wanted to be a banker or stockbroker but was too stupid for it, who compares himself to them rather than to the rest of us and it’s this attitude that has lead directly to this widescale expense fiddling.

It’s not the expenses therefore, it’s the culture, of having one law for the rich and another for everybody else. To say it’s all a media hype isn’t just downright stupid, it’s dangerous. This corruption needs to be rooted out if Britain stands a chance of solving its problems.